Asolo Repertory Theatre and Playwright Ken Ludwig Team Up for New Play LADY MOLLY OF SCOTLAND YARD

Asolo Repertory Theatre is teaming with one of the world’s most produced playwrights, Ken Ludwig, for his newest play Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, based on the detective stories by Baroness Emmuska Orczy. The partnership will launch with a closed reading of the thriller/comedy on Sunday, March 10, 2024. Asolo Rep Producing Artistic Director, Peter Rothstein, will direct.

Rothstein, stated “Asolo Rep has a long and successful history of producing Ken Ludwig plays: Crazy For You, Three Musketeers, Murder on the Orient Express, The Games Afoot. It is an extraordinary honor that one of the most celebrated playwrights of our time has chosen the Asolo to develop and produce his latest play. 

“Asolo Rep has staged such Wonderful Productions of my work over the last several years that I knew there was no theatre in the country better suited to developing Lady Molly of Scotland Yard,” stated playwright Ken Ludwig. “I couldn’t be more thrilled to be working with Peter Rothstein, whose expertise and experience will bring this play so joyously to life.”

In this world premiere reading, Ken Ludwig brings his signature theatricality and brilliant comic flare to a high-octane thriller in which the fate of the world is at stake. London, 1940: the war rages across the Channel. German bombs drop on the city nightly. Scotland Yard detective Lady Molly Robertson and her partner Peg just want a good cup of tea. But when they witness a murder at the swanky Savoy Hotel, the seemingly simple case leads them deep into the British war effort and the top-secret code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park. Going undercover as cryptographers, they discover that Bletchley has more secrets than scientists and uncover a plot that will strike at the very heart of Britain. Lady Molly and Peg must race against time to avert disaster, narrowly avoiding death at every turn, and they ultimately prove that no problem is too difficult for brilliant women to overcome. Five actors play more than 20 characters in this tour-de-force new comedy-thriller.

The reading cast, in alphabetical order, will include Matthew Amendt, Trezure Coles, Dylan Godwin, Aneisa J. Hicks, Adelin Phelps and Sally Wingert.

ABOUT Ken Ludwig

Ken Ludwig may well be the most well-performed playwright of his generation. He has had six productions on Broadway and eight in London’s West End. His 34 plays and musicals are staged around the world and throughout the United States every night of the year. They have been produced in over 20 languages in more than 30 countries, and many have become standards of the American repertoire. 

His first play, Lend Me a Tenor, won two Tony Awards and was called “one of the classic comedies of the 20th century” by The Washington Post. Crazy For You was on Broadway for five years, on the West End for three, and won the Tony and Olivier Awards for Best Musical. His play Murder on the Orient Express will shortly begin a tour of China and his musical Crazy For You is currently touring Japan.

In addition, he has won the Edwin Forrest Award for Contributions to the American Theatre, two Laurence Olivier Awards, two Helen Hayes Awards, the Charles MacArthur Award, and the Edgar Award for Best Mystery of the Year. He was also nominated for an Emmy Award for writing the Kennedy Center Honors. His other plays include Moon Over Buffalo; Leading Ladies; Baskerville; Sherwood; Twentieth Century; Dear Jack, Dear Louise; A Fox on the Fairway; A Comedy of Tenors; The Game’s Afoot; Shakespeare in Hollywood; and Moriarty. They have starred, among others, Alec Baldwin, Carol Burnett, Tony Shaloub, Joan Collins, and Kristin Bell. 

His book How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare, published by Penguin Random House, has been a bestseller and is coming out this year in a new, expanded edition. It won the Falstaff Award for Best Shakespeare Book of the Year. His essays on theatre are published in the Yale Review, and he gives the Annual Ken Ludwig Playwriting Scholarship at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. 

His first opera, Tenor Overboard, opened at the Glimmerglass Festival in July 2022. His most recent world premieres were Lend Me A Soprano and Moriarty, and his newest plays and musicals include Pride and Prejudice Part 2: Napoleon at Pemberley, Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, Beginner’s Luck and Easter Parade. 

He has been commissioned to write plays by the Agatha Christie Estate, the Royal Shakespeare Company, The Old Globe Theatre, and the Bristol Old Vic. For more information visit www.KenLudwig.com.

BARONESS EMMUSKA ORCZY, (born September 23, 1865, Tarnaörs, Hungary—died November 12, 1947, London, England), Hungarian-born British novelist chiefly remembered as author of The Scarlet Pimpernel, one of the great literary popular successes of the 20th century.

The only child of Baron Felix Orczy, a noted composer and conductor, she was educated in Brussels and Paris, then studied art in London. She later exhibited some of her work in the Royal Academy. She became famous in 1905 with the publication of The Scarlet Pimpernel, set in the times of the French Revolution, and relating the swashbuckling adventures of the “elusive” Sir Percy Blakeney, whose mission was to smuggle French aristocrats out of the country to safety. Orczy produced sequels—The Elusive Pimpernel (1908), The Way of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1933)—which were less successful than the original. She also wrote several detective stories that revolutionized the genre, including Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910) and Unravelled Knots (1925).

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